From barbarian other to chosen people: the etymology, ideology and evolution of ‘nation’ at the shifting edge of medieval Western Christendom

Abstract

Medieval scholars have demonstrated that the term gens (plural gentes), largely identical in usage to the modern term nation, was in use by the end of the first millennium. This article seeks to explain how and when nation came to replace gens in medieval Europe. The emergence of the concept of nationhood in Central and Eastern Europe must also be understood as a process of othering and resistance to othering, whereby emerging states seek to affirm their status as civilized Christian states, the political, social and cultural equals of the older states that had risen out of the Roman Empire.